December 30, 2006

Among the All India Muslim League’s second cadre leadership, Abdullah Haroon was actively associated with the AIML for barely five years (1937-42). Yet he stands high in its echelons. What sets him apart was his pioneering role in conceptualizing “ Pakistan ” as it came to be embodied in the Lahore Resolution (1940).

To quote Reginald Coupland, who did a three-part Report on the Constitutional Problem in India (1942-44), Abdullah Haroon was “the only Muslim politician of any standing who had so far [till early 1939] taken a public part in the constitutional discussion” on the Pakistan proposal. Thus, though Haroon did not live long enough to see his “dream” come true, he had yet etched for himself a niche in the national pantheon as one of the founding fathers of Pakistan.

By the late 1938, when he seriously launched upon a campaign to popularize the Pakistan idea, Abdullah Haroon had been in politics and public life for some twenty-five years. And he had entered public life in 1913, if only because of his penchant to cause awakening among the downtrodden masses and work for their amelioration and emancipation.

Politics to Haroon, as to Jinnah, was a means of serving the community and the country, and not a source of amassing wealth. Like Jinnah, Abdullah Haroon had built for himself (and his family) a solid financial base before he barged into politics. Like Jinnah, again, he financed his political activities out of his own personal funds. More significant, he contributed generously to meet in part the running of the party he was involved with.

Thus, in one of his last letters sent posthumously, he told Shaikh Abdul Majid, “… you know very well that I have no more funds left and the Working Committee of the [Muslim League] Assembly Party, except a very few, none yet sent in their help, though they had promised to do so. As yet I have been financing all the expenses of the Muslim League Branch here.”

Along with his political activities, Abdullah Haroon had helped to build institutions in the spheres of education, health and social welfare that would make groups and communities become self-contained and self-sustaining, step by step, in terms of their requirements in these areas.

And he liberally opened his coffers to dole out huge sums to finance a good many social causes, all through his public life. In fact, his philanthropy knew no bounds when it came to alleviating the sufferings of the poor, the orphan, and the needy. And this continued unabated till his last breath. From July 1941 to late April 1942 – that is, during the last ten months of his life – he had given away a princely sum of Rs. 88,961 to charities, which would be equivalent to about Rs. 10 million at current prices.

Simultaneously, he also built several institutions – for the welfare of the poor and the needy. Thus, he distinguished himself as a role model in advancing social causes materially, and helping the indigent, the orphan and the disadvantaged to become educated and acquire skills, so that they become job worthy and efficient, and financially self-sufficient, so that they cease to be a burden on the society.

As indicated earlier, Haroon’s politics were ancillary to his campaign for the human resource development of the community. And once he had securely established himself in business, which he did by the late 1890s, he became increasingly involved with civic problems and activities in Karachi .

By 1917, when both the pan-Islamic movement and the demand for Home Rule had gathered momentum, he decided to barge into national politics. And except for Ghulam Mohammad Bhurgi (d. 1924), he was among the foremost Muslim leaders of Sind whose activities had impacted significantly on the all-India mainstream politics.

Thus, he was active at one time or another, with the major political organizations – the Indian National Congress (1917f.), the All India Khilafat Committee (1919-29), Sind Provincial Political Conference (1920-30s), the All Parties Conference (1928), the All Parties Muslim Conference (1930-34), the Azad Sind Conference (1930), and the Muslim League (1937 ff).

A strenuous advocate and campaigner for the separation of Sind from Bombay Presidency, he continuously lobbied or it, proposing resolutions at all- India moots, from 1925 onwards. He repeatedly urged the Aga Khan who led the Muslim delegation to the Round Table Conference (1930-32) and Jinnah to get the Sind separation issue settled favourably during the London confabulations.

Along with Muhammad Ayub Khuhro and Miran Muhammad Shah, Haroon had also played a leading role in getting Sind acquire an autonomous provincial status in the Act of 1935.

This was certainly one of Haroon’s great political accomplishments. Yet it would be overshadowed by his pioneering role in canalizing the course of mainstream Muslim politics late in the 1930s. His electoral defeat early in 1937 led him to wind up the Sind United Party which he had set up alongwith Sir Shahnawaz Bhutto in 1936 to fight the provincial elections. While Bhutto opted for a government job and a safe sanctuary in Bombay , Haroon undauntedly chose to face the music.

The emerging political scenario was obviously unchartered and unpredictable, but he chose to undertake the daunting task of canalizing the miniscule Sindhi political elite towards playing its due part in all India politics. He had the vision and the imagination to see the problems of Sind in an all-India context, and to establish organic linkages between Sind and the larger pan-Indian Muslim community, and with mainstream Muslim politics, which was then encompassed by the All India Muslim League (AIML).

He, therefore, joined the Muslim League in 1937, established contacts and rapport with its top leadership at Lucknow in October 1937, and organized it at various tiers in the province. And that to a point that, in concert with Shaikh Abdul Majid and Pir Ali Muhammad Rashidi, he was able to successfully organize the First Sind Provincial Muslim League Conference in Karachi, early in October 1938.

In terms of the themes discussed and the standing of the participants, it was not only an all India moot, except for it nomenclature, but would as well acquire a land-mark status in the AIML’s annals. Presided over by Jinnah, it was participated in by a galaxy of Muslim leaders drawn from the Punjab to Hyderabad (Deccan), from Bombay to Bengal. Indeed, it read like a who’s who of Muslim India at the moment. Here, Haroon who was Chairman, Reception Committee, called the shots. His welcome address, which set the tone and tenor for the Conference, was uncharacteristically radical and militant: it commended an ideological goal. Unless adequate safeguards and protection for minorities were duly provided, declared Haroon, the Muslims would have no alternative but “to seek their salvation in their own way in an independent federation of Muslim states”.

He drew a parallel with Czechoslovakia which had been partitioned to provide safeguards to the Sudeten Germans, and warned, almost prophetically, that the same might happen in India should the majority community persist in its “present course”, warning that “We have nearly arrived at the parting of the ways and until and unless this problem is solved to the satisfaction of all, it will be impossible to save India from being divided into Hindu India and Muslim India, both placed under separate federation”.

This was indeed radical stuff. No one had spoken from the League’s platform in such a strain before. Interestingly, the telling parallel between Indian Muslims and the Sudeten Germans was, surprisingly, picked up by Jinnah in his presidential address, indicating that Haroon’s originality and analytical approach had obliged him to think on the same wave length and that he was also, willy nilly, edging towards partition.

In a more pronounced way was the main resolution at the conference cast in the Haroon’s mould. Though diluted in the Subjects Committee deliberations at the insistence of Jinnah himself who was characteristically not too keen to show his hand prematurely before Muslims were fully organized and public opinion galvanized behind the ideological goal, the resolution yet retained enough of its clout to become a trend setter and to warrant attention.

Briefly stated, the resolution argued the case of separate Muslim nationhood in India, not merely in terms of transient factors such as “the caste-ridden mentality and anti-Muslim policy of the majority community” but, more importantly, in terms of durable factors such as “the acute differences of religion, language, script, culture, social laws and outlook on the life of the two major communities and even of race in certain parts”. Thus, the concept of separate Muslim nationhood was spelled out not merely in political and immediate terms, but on an intellectual plane, laying down in categorical terms the ideological basics and bases of that nationhood.

Equally significant, this was also the first time that the Hindus and Muslims were officially pronounced by the Muslim League as two distinct nations. As a corollary to this pronouncement, the Resolution, in its operative part, said inter alia. “This Conference considers it absolutely essential in the interests of an abiding peace of the vast Indian continent and in the interests of unhampered cultural development, the economic and social betterment, and the political self-determination of the two nations known as Hindus and Muslims, to recommend to All-India Muslim League to review and revise the entire question of what should be the suitable constitution for India which will secure honourable and legitimate status due to them, and that this Conference recommends to the All-India Muslim League to devise a scheme of Constitution under which Muslims may attain full independence”. (italics ours).

Buttressing the resolution’s call, Abdullah Haroon wrote in his “Foreward” to Dr. Syed Abdul Latif’s The Muslim Problem in India (1939), which he had sponsored, that “The Hindu-Muslim problem in India has grown so serious… that the Muslims see no other way of consolidating their future except [for] carving out cultural zones or separate homelands for themselves. What they insist upon is equality of freedom for every community – freedom for all and not for the majority community only…, the Muslims are anxious to have for themselves separate homelands where they might live a life of their own and from where they might be in a position to work with their Hindu brethren living in similar homelands of their own for the common good of their country as a whole.”

This explains why Coupland had singled out Abdullah Haroon as having made a significant contribution to the constitutional debate of the late 1930s, leading to the partition demand.

In perspective, then the Sind Conference resolution sought to break new ground: it was truly epochal. Indeed, it represented the penultimate step to, and prepared the ground for, the adoption of the Lahore Resolution at the Muslim League session in March 1940. And herein lies the significance of Haji Abdullah Haroon as a trend-setter in modern Muslim India’s politics, and as a “shaper” of history in a larger sense.

— Sharif al Mujahid

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